Lantern Theater Company

J Hernandez has been a constant presence on Philadelphia stages his acclaimed portrayal of Iago in a 2013 production of Othello. Phindie spoke to the Texas native about relocating, being a Latino actor, and why he loves Philly theater.

From about 100 entries, winners in twenty-two categories were selected by a panel of twelve judges and announced at the Barrymore Awards ceremony tonight. InterAct Theatre’s Down Past Passyunk won top…

Makoto Hirano asks Lantern artistic director Charles McMahon some tough questions about the “Super Racist” Julius Caesar. And a clearly contrite McMahon does his best to explain the process that lead to the company’s misguided choices.

There’s something haunting Roelf (Peter DeLaurier) in the Lantern Theater Company’s atmospheric production of Athol Fugard’s THE TRAIN DRIVER. Disturbed by the memory of a young woman and baby “pulverized”…

You may have seen the Lantern Theater Company’s JULIUS CAESAR, which recast Shakespeare’s political tragedy in Feudal Japan. You may also have seen the open letter that local playwright and performer Makoto Hirano hand-delivered to The Lantern on “How to Stage Your Show Without Being Super Racist,” which he signed “Makoto Hirano, Dance-theatre artist, actual Japanese person, and actual Samurai descendent,” reposted on Phindie with Hirano’s consent.

“Will it be in yellow face,” my friend asked when I told him about Lantern Theater Company’s decision to stage Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in feudal Japan, when what the meant was “in kimonos with some Japanese screens and music” seemed somehow culturally tone deaf.

If William Shakespeare was alive today he’d be a …. well, he’d probably be a poet and playwright, but he’d also make a damn good political speechwriter. The crux of his JULIUS CAESAR, now in an accessible production by Lantern Theater Company, comes in a speech following the title character’s assassination.

Director Charles McMahon, founding artistic director of the Lantern Theater Company, asserts that all of Shakespeare’s plays, whenever or wherever they’re set, are in fact observations about contemporary England. By shifting the locales to places outside of his homeland.

Dylan Thomas’s poem A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES runs the risk of becoming sticky-sweet with nostalgia, and it is director Sebastienne Mundheim’s idiosyncratic vision, and the spot-on instincts of her actors, which…

From the archives…

HENRY V completes Shakespeare’s four-part series on Plantagenet kings of England. No longer the indolent partier, Prince Hal has inherited the English throne, but is haunted by the original sin that was his father’s usurping of the crown. A hyperbolic Chorus (Krista Apple-Hodge) introduces the “swelling scene” in which the young king (Ben Dibble) finds himself, as “two mighty monarchies” (France and England) renew a century of warfare.